By christelle.rabil@croptrust.org
July 8, 2026

Three years after partnering with the Crop Trust, IER Mali has taken its data management and publication to the next level.

Meet the Team

The Institute of Rural Economy (IER) is a public institution founded in 1960 and serves as the flagship of Mali’s national agricultural research system. Its mission includes developing and implementing agricultural research programs, providing technical support for agricultural development, and ensuring that technological innovations reach rural communities.

IER’s areas of expertise include agricultural and livestock production, post-harvest and food technologies, socio-economics, and agricultural economics. It also operates Mali’s national genebank, the Unit of Genetic Resources, under the umbrella of the Institut d'Economie Rurale (IER).

The genebank conserves traditional crop cultivars and wild relatives ex situ. Its work focuses on cereals such as sorghum, millet, maize, fonio and rice; legumes and oilseed crops such as sesame, soybean, Bambara groundnut, cowpea and groundnut; as well as okra, amaranth and melons. IER also maintains a field collection of 100 mango varieties and carries out in situ conservation activities in several regions of Mali.

IER began its partnership with Genesys in early 2023, when it signed the Data Provider Agreement and published its first batch of data on Genesys.

At the time, according to IER’s data manager Hamara Dabo, passport data were scattered across separate Excel sheets, usually organized by crop and not following a single standard format. With limited resources, the genebank had not been able to invest in an internal data management system. Like many genebanks around the world, the team was doing its best with the tools available - mainly spreadsheets.

The first task, together with the Genesys team, was to bring these scattered data together into one structure. This was no small exercise. Anyone who has worked with spreadsheets knows how easily columns, formats and values can become inconsistent over time. The initial work focused on aggregating data for maize, cowpea and rice, while supporting the IER team through one-on-one guidance, collective training sessions and meetings of Community of Practice on Data Management in its french edition’s exchanges on data cleaning, standardization and validation.

Over the following two years, the team made remarkable progress. They applied the training consistently and gradually brought the entire passport dataset of the genebank into one format and one sheet. The result was a comprehensive dataset, including georeferenced data in decimal format and dates formatted according to the MCPD v.2.1 standard - the standard for exchange of passport data on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.

But spreadsheet-based data management has its limits, and these became clearer when DOIs were introduced into the passport dataset. This was another important milestone for the IER team. Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, are a best-practice tool for uniquely identifying accessions and improving the traceability of plant genetic material. Their use is aligned with the GLIS system, which helps make PGRFA accession-level information easier to reference, exchange and track across systems.

However, maintaining this level of data in a spreadsheet was no longer doing the genebank justice. The passport data needed to be linked more directly and reliably to the physical seed managed by the genebank, and the team needed a more comprehensive system to support day-to-day genebank operations.

A Digitized Genebank

In 2026, Mali became one of the recipients of support through the Crop Trust’s Securing Our Seeds project. The project aims to help digitize genebanks in West Africa and Latin America, strengthen internal data management with GRIN-Global Community Edition (GGCE), and support the publication of accession-level data through Genesys.

Within the very short timeframe since the launching of the project,  just six months, IER has achieved significant progress. First and foremost, the team set up a local area network at the genebank, an essential step given that GGCE is web-based and requires reliable connectivity within the genebank environment. With support from the Crop Trust, the team then moved quickly to migrate their data and begin integrating GGCE into their daily operations.

By last week, IER Mali refreshed its Genesys data directly from GGCE for the first time - a major step forward from the spreadsheets where the journey began only three years ago.

And the progress did not stop there. To bring their data even closer to users, the team also enabled Embedded Genesys on the IER website, including the option to request material, and in the French language.

Embedded Genesys is a JavaScript library that interacts with Genesys servers and mirrors a genebank’s published data on another website. It supports browsing and searching passport data, displaying accession details, maps, subsets and datasets associated with each accession, and calculating the Passport Data Completeness Index. It can also support germplasm request workflows, helping genebanks make their collections more visible and accessible to users.

In just three years, IER Mali has moved from scattered crop-based spreadsheets to standardized passport data, DOI-enabled records, GGCE-supported operations, refreshed publication through Genesys and live data visibility on its own institutional website.

If there were an award for the genebank with most improved data management, we would definitely grant IER Mali the award. Then again, we are only halfway through the year…